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Description/Abstract

In 1937 Viennese actor Anton Walbrook became an international star. While he had a growing profile in Europe, Walbrook’s Austrian and German films had received limited circulation in the UK and America, and it was the success of his Hollywood debut, The Soldier and the Lady (UK title: Michael Strogoff), directed by George Nicholls Jr., in the summer that year that consolidated his profile. Yet the role that really secured Walbrook’s film career and fashioned his star persona for at least the next decade was that of Albert, the Prince Consort, to British star Anna Neagle’s Victoria in Wilcox’s historical biopic Victoria the Great and its Technicolor sequel, Sixty Glorious Years (1938). This chapter explores the ways in which Walbrook’s émigré biography resonated with the contemporary issues of national identity, nostalgia and landscape that can be seen to inform Walbrook's pivotal roles of 1936-40.